Online retailer Tmall, Alibaba's business-to-consumer (B2C) platform, announced yesterday that it will launch a book site tomorrow, which analysts said may increase competition and lead to a price war in the online bookstore sector.

Different from other websites which buy books from publishers and then sell them to consumers, Tmall will introduce 50 publishers and 20 B2C book websites to sell books directly to consumers. More than 1.3 million book titles will be available on the site, Tmall said in an e-mail sent to the Global Times yesterday.

"Tmall wants to enrich user experience by expanding into different sectors," Yan Qiao, PR director at the company, told the Global Times yesterday.

The booming online book retailing business is attracting more e-commerce companies because books have higher gross profit margins compared to digital products and clothes, Feng Lin, an e-commerce analyst at Hangzhou-based China e-Business Research Center, told the Global Times yesterday.

Different from other book retailers, Tmall offers a platform on which businesses can offer delivery themselves so as to shorten the delivery time. But the model has a drawback as it prevents Tmall from controlling user experience when the services are offered by publishers rather than Tmall itself, Feng said.

Unperturbed by Tmall's new move, Ye Xiaozhou, a PR manager of Dangdang, expressed confidence in the prospects of Dangdang's book business, as "Dangdang has been engaged in the book sector for 12 years."

Dangdang said in late May that it has 790,000 book titles and sales in the first quarter of 2012 increased 35 percent to 700 million yuan ($109.88 million).

Online book retailing is a relatively mature market, and Dangdang and Amazon have already gained leading positions in the sector, with well-established brand recognition, said Chen Shousong, an analyst with e-commerce consulting firm Analysys International.

"It will be difficult for Tmall to achieve a big scale for its book business, as the market has a limited scope and is stable, leaving little room for late comers," Chen noted.

Dangdang leads China's online publication business with a market share of 29.4 percent in the first quarter of 2012, followed by Amazon's 27.5 percent and Tencent's 3.8 percent. Tmall holds 3.4 percent market share, ranking the fourth, according to data released by Analysys International.

Besides Dangdang and Amazon which are known for their online bookstores, online retailer 360buy.com also joined the competition in February 2011, followed by Suning in October, triggering a price war.

Ye from Dangdang said it will take time before we know whether Tmall's move would bring about a new round of price war. But Chen said that Dangdang is very likely to join the price war if Tmall started cutting prices of books to win consumers.

"However, while price is a factor in the success of online bookstores, it is not the most important one. Book categories and delivery services are more important in order to compete for consumer loyalty," Chen said.